This invention pertains in general to a curcuit for use with a musical instrument. More particularly, the present invention relates to an electronic device that is used with an accordion so that when the base buttons are played a string bass instrument is simulated. The device or circuit of this invention may be self-contained within the accordion or it can be disposed remote from the accordion.
A standard accordion has a panel keyboard on the right-hand that covers at least two octaves and has bass buttons on the left-hand side. These base buttons have a set of reeds associated therwith which correspond to an octave of low frequency notes. Because of the necessarily small size of these reeds, they produce very little sound in the fundamental bass frequency. Amplification by standard means using mecrophones is not a satisfactory solution to this deficient bass sound since the upper harmonics associated with these reeds tend to override the fundamental bass frequency. Moveover, it is not practical to equalize out these higher harmonics since the microphone would not then be effective in amplifying the midrange chords which are also produced in the left-hand section of the accordion. Even if these difficulties could be overcome, there still remains the problem that the reed sound has an extremely fast decay which is quite unlike that of a string bass.
Accordingly, one object of the present invention is to overcome the above problems by providing an electronic device that is responsive to the playing of the bass buttons for electronically simulating a bass string instrument.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an electronic device or circuit in accordance with this invention and that provides for a bass plucking sound.
A further object of the present invention is to provide a device in accordance with this present invention and which may be either installed within the accordion or disposed in a unit remote from the accordion and connected by conductor means thereto.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide an electronic device which expands the bass note range from the available single octave to greater than a single octave. This expansion in the disclosed embodiment is by a half octave.
Still a further object of the present invention is to provide an electronic device for use with accordion that simulates a string bass instrument and that can be constructed relatively simply, can be made at a relatively low cost, and is easily installed into an existing accordion.